Mrs. Patrick Campbell

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today we are going to talk about an actress actor, although she would have called herself an actress because that sort of more standardized form of using a non gendered noun for it would not have existed then. She was hugely famous in the early twentieth century, although she has not really retained her iconic status the way some other actors have. She kind of got into acting in a surprising, sort of sideways way, but she quickly had a reputation as a stage diva with a sharp tongue, and she also originated one of the most beloved characters of the stage and screen. We are talking about missus Patrick Campbell, which was the name that she used publicly and professionally throughout her her life. It was her stage name, but it was also what people knew her as we will talk about her birth name. But we have to talk about names being tricky here because in her personal life, some people, especially family members, called her Beatrice. Particularly older family members always called her that. Other people called her Stella. That was her middle name, but she also had a daughter named Stella that comes up a few times in this episode. So if we refer to her by first name, we're using Beatrice just to avoid confusion. But I think with her closest friends and beloved she was Stella. She was also often called Missus Pat, though even by people who knew her pretty well, So we will generally refer to her either as Beatrice, Missus Pat, or Missus Campbell when we're talking about her. Her daughter Stella is only going to be called Stella and will be the only one. Additionally, to make things a little confusing, I feel like their family just liked to play fast and loose with names and nicknames. Because she had a son who was named Alan, he also went by the nickname Bo and people referred to him as that throughout his life. So if you hear either of those, we mean her son, it's a lot. I'm sure I missed something in there. So Beatrice Stella Tanner was born on February ninth, eighteen sixty five, in London, England. Her parents were John Tanner and Maria Luigia Jovanna Romanini, and according to Beatrice, the two of them fell in love at first sight the first time they met in Bombay, India. John's father was an army contractor for the British East India Company and Maria's father was a political exile, so both of their families were there. Neither of them spoke the other one's language, but John and Maria got married while still living there in India and had six children there before moving to London. Once they got to London, three more kids, including Beatrice. According to Beatrice, when she was tiny, she cried so much that the nurse the family hired for her told her parents, quote, she is not a baby, she is a tiger. She also caused the same nurse unintelligent. Yeah, I told you she had a biting tongue. In her autobiography, Beatrice wrote of her father, quote, my father, it seems, managed to get through two large fortunes. He was careless with money, exceptionally generous, delighting in business, enterprise and speculation. In that book, she details a letter that he once wrote her, in which he explained the various pitfalls of life that had cost him his financial security, and she concludes that discussion with quote, people who knew my father well, spoke with much love of his extraordinary kindness and buoyant spirits. As for her mother, Beatrice clearly just thought the world of her. Reminisced about her beautiful singing voice and how she spoke so many languages and played guitar. She wrote of Maria Luigia, quote, my Italian mother and her beautiful sisters were invested for me with great romantic glamour that has remained with me, and the few stories I was told about their youthful adventures delight me now as they did when I was a child, and felt proud that they were my people. While her eldest brother was away at school, he died unexpectedly, and her father was often back in India, so her memory of all of this appears to be her mother. In mourning, she describes her as elegant and beautiful, and also wrote of her mother, quote, she gave me her great love of beauty. She could not pass by beauty unnoticed. Beatrice's mother influenced and nurtured her love of the arts, and she wrote of it, quote from my mother, I learned my love of music. Schubert was my first love. She sang his songs in French with a touch a unsentimental simplicity. My mother spoke to me with enthusiasm of the Italian actor Salvini Rossi and Madame Roustori, also of the singers Mario and Grisi and Adelina Patti. I do not think she ever saw any of our English players. If she did, I never heard her speak of them. And writing of herself and her formative years, she said quote, I think I was neither a sweet, amiable nor amenable child. I was physically strong, very affectionate, imaginative, but temperamentally alien to those around me. I believe I was impatient with unintelligent people from the moment I was born. A tragedy for I myself am three parts a fool. She mostly speaks of her childhood as pretty enjoyable, though one of her favorite activities was digging holes in the garden and filling them with water and then sitting in a mud bath, sort of inspired by tales of ancient Roman baths. This caused her siblings embarrassment, though, because she often looked like a wild child just covered in mud. Yeah. She tells one story in her memoir about her sister basically having a boy come over and what he was greeted with was like this little crazed looking kid that was just a mud pile. At the age of ten, Beatrice started attending school in Brighton. She did not like it. She found it dull, and she was also kind of generally frightened and shy around people outside of the family. A new period of upheaval came when, following the marriage of her oldest sister, Nina, her father and brothers moved to the US to help her uncle who was trying to set up some business in Texas. So Beatrice, her sisters, and their mother moved into a smaller home. Then her mother's friend, Catherine Bailey, offered to take Beatrice to Paris to live for a year to study French and music, which she did and that year, she said, quote filled me with delight. But by the time she returned home to England, the family for was really in pretty bad shape. A cousin of Beatrice's father named Eliza Hogarth heard her playing the piano and thought she was talented enough that she needed lessons, so Eliza offered to pay for her to attend formal lessons at the Guildhall School of Music. Things went well there. They went well enough that Beatrice won a scholarship to a three year music school in Leipzig, but she never used that scholarship because when Beatrice was seventeen, she met Patrick Campbell at a card party. As we said, she was seventeen when she met Pat and he was twenty. She described him as handsome and gentle, with the love of nature and his family. They married just four months after they met, and Beatrice never finished her music studies. They had eloped, and when they told Beatrice's mother, she was not entirely happy. She felt that her daughter had given up everything for a sudden romance. Beatrice later wrote of this relationship quote, after more than thirty five years of life, with its battles, its wounds, its every ready pain, it is not easy to write of the joy of that first love. Incapable of pause or reckoning. With the divine faith and courage of fearless children, we faced the world we thought ours, and paid the price bravely. Beatrice and Patrick had a son named Alan Urqhart Campbell. The family called Alan Bo as a nickname. It's a variation on Beatrice. Two years later, the Campbells welcomed their second child that was a daughter named Stella. But unfortunately, Beatrice and Patrick were faced with some unfortunate news. Patrick's health had never been robust, and his doctor said that he was too weak to remain in the city. Beatrice recalled being terrified of what was going to happen to them, and at the time, she was still pregnant with Stella, and she describes this night where she couldn't sleep and she was pacing in their small garden late at night, worrying. She wrote quote, I knew was not strong enough to continue working in the city, and that I must help. I could not imagine what work I could do. I had given up my musical scholarship and so was not qualified for a musical career. My lovely baby and another coming in a few weeks, must be provided for. I was bewildered, lost with the daylight. Something entered my soul and has never since left me. It seemed to cover me like a fine veil of steel, giving me a strange sense of security. Slowly I became conscious that within myself lay the strength I needed, and that I must never be afraid. In eighteen eighty six, she joined the Anomalies Dramatic Club, which was a London group that staged plays so its members could gain experience and hone their skills. There were three hundred and sixty five members. They paid three pounds, three shillings and dues to pay for the plays that they were performing each year at the Town Hall. She was asked to play a lead role in one of their stagings after the original actor got sick. Meanwhile, Patrick's health got worse and his doctor prescribed him time at sea in the hopes that he would improve. He left first for Australia. The idea was that he was going to stay with a family member who lived there and he would look for work once he got there, and then he would send for Beatrice and the kids once he settled. But that didn't work out and he ended up moving from Australia to Zimbabwe. He found work here and there, and for a while he was connected with the imperialist Cecil Rhodes and his debier's Diamond operation. Patrick would send checks home as often as he could, although there were sometimes large gaps in between, and that lack of steady income led Beatrice to ask Pat if he was okay with her seeking professional acting jobs, and he wrote back that he was supportive of this idea. So this is all the version of the events as told largely from Beatrice's perspective. Seems that Beatrice was pregnant with Alan already when the two lovebirds eloped. So there are some interpretations of this situation that kind of take the position that Beatrice entrapped Patrick in a marriage that he never wanted. So in that interpretation, that's the reason that he left to travel. Missus Patt never mentions the date of her first child's birth in her memoir. That may be why, but it does seem like Patrick was truly almost always in precarious health. He wrote her a lot of letters while traveling that indicate a tenderness and a genuine love between them. I have some questions about the medical advice he was receiving. Way, go to sea well and like advising people to go to the seaside with the salt air to recover their health, like that was pretty common, but like taking on a boat taking a long voyage that like that was recognized as being really hard on your health. So I'm like, I'm confused here. Yeah, I mean, I think the thinking was that at least if you buy this version of it. England, no matter how remote you tried to become, was too industrialized at that point for him to be healthy, and he needed to get out of the country. That's my guess. I don't think there's any validity to that, but that's what I think was probably the logic and play. Beatrice started working with a touring company in eighteen eighty seven which put on almost exclusively Shakespeare plays. She made two pounds a week initially, and she had to provide her own dresses, and she started going by missus Patrick Campbell at that time, and that was, as we said, her stage name throughout her life. She wrote of her first professional appearance, quote, when I came to the stage, my first feeling was that the audience was too far away for me to reach out to them. So I must, as it were, quickly gather them up to myself. And I think I may say that this has always been the instinctive principle of my acting. Whether it is the wrong or the right principle, I leave it for others to decide. I am sure I had no technique and my voice this was the voice of a singing mouse. The papers praised me, and they also praised my dresses, and I was very proud and happy. From there, she really became an audience favorite. She was often cast in leading roles, although she describes herself as delicate and having to miss a number of performances and one time coming down with typhoid and having to sit out six weeks of shows. After weathering the most serious of her illnesses, she describes regaining her health, but not her faith in the world. Having come out of this experience without the naive positivity of her youth, she knew that life was fragile and that Pat may never really be able to provide for the family. Patrick was away from the family for six and a half years, during which Missus Pat, as she was often called, was continuing her career rise. In eighteen ninety three, Missus Campbell appeared in her breakout role in the play The Second Missus tanker A. In this play, written by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, she played Paula. This is what's known as a problem play, meaning that the central device of the plot is driven by social issues that were considered controversial in the time the play is written. It's a genre that is credited in its early development to Alexandre duma Feis. In the case of Panero's play, mister tanker A, a widower, announces his upcoming marriage to a woman named Paula Jarmont. That's Missus Campbell's character, who is considered a ruined woman, i e. She has had sexual relations outside of marriage. The two wed and their marriage is plagued by problems, made much worse when mister Tankeray's daughter gets engaged unknowingly to the man who Paula had an affair with years earlier. It is a drama and it ends tragically. But even though some critics were really kind of displeased by the subject matter and thought the whole thing was icky, Missus Campbell's performance was raved over that had really not been a guaranteed situation. Rehearsals had not gone particularly well. Missus pat developed what she called nervous exhaustion and some rehearsals right up through the second dress rehearsal, she just walked through her part with minimal emotion. But on opening night she was in full force and the reviews really reflected it. She was instantly famous in London, but she found this attention Jarring, writing quote, I was surrounded by what seemed to me intolerable curiosity. There were searching, thrill seeking questions and strange, critical glances which offended me, sometimes arousing impertinent courage on my part. She found herself trying to reconcile the stage star that people perceived her to be, with the quote fragile, unsophisticated young woman whose heart and nerves had been torn by poverty, illness, and the cruel strain of a long separation from the husband she loved. She found the experience of celebrity and strangers speculating about her life really isolating. I feel like this is one of the earliest instances where people where someone really has insight and is able to articulate what that feeling must be like, of like why being a celebrity is actually quite stressful. We are gonna pause here for a sponsor break, and when we come back, we'll talk about some of the challenges that arose in Beatrice's early fame. Although she was lauded for her talents, Missus Campbell still was sometimes seized with nerves during one of her performances as Missus Tankery. Well into the play's run, she forgot all her lines and she could not clearly hear the prompt that she was given from the wings, so someone had to physically walk on stage and hand her a script to read from until she recovered. But she recovered so well that the incident actually seemed to bolster her reputation instead of harming it. As her career was really taking off. There was a lot going on in her personal life. Her father died during the second run of Missus Tanker A. He was living in Texas at the time with her brothers, so she found out via a letter. And then in March of eighteen ninety four, Patrick finally returned from Africa after six and a half years away. She wrote of their reunion quote, when Pat arrived, I saw in his eyes that youth, with all the belief and faith in his own efforts and his luck had gone. His health and his energies were undermined by fever, failure, in the most bitter disappointments. Nothing had come of his hard work, his hopes, and his sacrifice. The expression in his face wrung my heart, But the old gentleness and tenderness were there. He still loved me. His pride in his beautiful children, and in my success that was by reward. The transition back to life together was kind of a strange one. Patrick returned to a wife who was famous and in demand, and at a time when he kind of wanted to take some time to have quiet family time at home. He became a curiosity to Missus Campbell's fans and the press. Additionally, Beatrice was busy. She had eight performances a week, so that time together was kind of limited, but they were together. They were, by her accounts, still in love, and Patrick supported her career as best he could in between relapses of malaria. After the second Missus Tanka for Missus Patrick Campbell, as the New York Times put it, quote, thereafter one success followed another, It's not entirely accurate. There were definitely some bad reviews in the mix, and some instances where one of her performances and her run was especially uneven due to her ongoing nervous exhaustion. Her next critically acclaimed role was as Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in eighteen ninety five, but that was one where her opening wasn't really strong. Although all the other shows were in the case of one original play, Michael and His Lost Angel, she dropped out because she found it too vulgar and the playwright's edits to it weren't sufficient. That play failed. She was blamed in part for the failure, but overall her success seemed to climb pretty consistently. In nineteen hundred, she starred in Magda, which is a play about a German girl who has left her small town and has become a famous singer. Because of her leaving, her father refuses to ever even speak her name again, and when she returns home after having achieved fame, her father scorns her and it is revealed that she had a child out of wedlock and that pregnancy was the cause of her leaving town. This leads to pressures to accept a marriage proposal and a tense final scene where Magda's father threatens to shoot her if she does not marry to save her reputation. Both the play, which was trans from the original German play written by Ermann Sudermann, and Missus Campbell's performance were panned, but despite its rocky start, this actually became one of her most popular roles, and that play was staged many many times throughout her life due to demand. In March of nineteen hundred, pat left again, this time to join the volunteer horse regiment known as the Imperial Yeomanry. That regiment was engaged in the Boer War, and on April fifth of that year, he was killed in action. Beatrice took a week off of work and then she returned to the stage. In addition to her personal loss, she also felt responsibility to the backers of the repertoire of the Royalty Theater. The theater was popular, but it had not made its money back on the season. In an effort to try to get some fresh money into the theater company, in nineteen oh one, Beatrice began her first booking in the US and started doing a tour there. This was part of a repertory engagement which lasted for six months, and it included two of her established claims to fame, the Second Missus Tankery and the Notorious Missus Ebbsmith. The Notorious Missus Ebbsmith was also written by Arthur Wing Pinero, and just as Tankeray, it debuted with Missus Patrick Campbell playing the lead role. Her character, Agnes Ebbsmith, is a woman who bucks social convention choosing to live with a man she's not married to after the passing of her husband. Agnes, in fact, is deeply against marriage, having been very unhappy in hers, and she's an outspoken advocate of society abandoning the practice altogether. The entire plot plays out as the various people in the lives of Agnes and her lover Lucas, try to intervene to get each of them to behave in the ways that conform to the various ideals that the other characters hold. As with the second Missus Tankeray, this story resolves in an unhappy way. In this case, the lead character is ultimately being broken of her spirit. In nineteen oh two, Missus Campbell was once again back in New York. This time she was starring in various plays in repertory, including Magda, Aunt Jenny, and The Joy of Living. But she was not happy. The noise out on the busy street was she felt bleeding into the theater and ruining her performances, and she complained so much that forty Second Street was covered in mulch to muffle the sounds of carriages on the street for the run of this show. While in New York, Missus Campbell also got a lot of attention this time around when she allegedly went to a lady's bridge party and walked away with twenty two thousand dollars in winnings. In nineteen oh seven, theater became a family affair for Missus Campbell. Her son Alan wrote a play called The Ambassador's Wife. She would later write of this play, which she starred in and which her daughter Stella also appeared in. It was quite a success in its way. Te teen oh seven, Beatrice also made news in a less artistic way when she was staying at the Plaza Hotel. Missus Campbell, in the course of the evening socializing, lit a cigarette and the staff was shocked. She was told she must douse that cigarette immediately, not because they didn't allow smoking on the premises, but they did not allow ladies to smoke on the premises. We're using the words ladies instead of women here, very deliberately, because she was informed that the hotel only sought ladies as guests, so she should not smoke there lest the hotel's reputation be tarnished. The years from nineteen oh nine to nineteen fourteen were very tumultuous for Campbell. In nineteen oh nine, having become her own manager and director, she took on a new role as producer. Socialite Jenny Spencer Churchill, known publicly as Lady Randolph Churchill, read Missus Campbell her play his borrowed plumes, and Campbell offered to produce it for her. The opening to a very specific crowd, given the status of the playwright. The Times theater critic Aby Walkley wrote of the opening quote, when mundane ladies produce original modern comedies out of their own original modern and quite charming heads. All the other mundane ladies who have written original modern comedies themselves, or might have done so if they had chosen, or are intending to do so the very next wet afternoon, come and look on so ah well refresher here Lady Randolph Churchill was Sir Winston Churchill's mother. Lord Randolph had already died. At this point. She was married to her second husband, George Cornwallis West. We're telling you that for a reason. Although the play itself got sort of amused to lukewarm reviews, something much more impactful on Missus Campbell's personal life happened as a result of all of this. In missus Pat's own words quote, then, in the unexpected way things sometimes happen in this world, George Cornwallis West was seriously attracted by me. I believed his life was unhappy and warmly gave him my friendship and affection. This caused gossip, misjudgment, and pain that cannot be gone into here. The two of them became quite close over the next several years. Missus Pat came down with an illness in nineteen twelve that was quite serious. Depending on the source you look at, you might see it categorized as a head injury, or as peritonitis, or as a nervous breakdown. And the truth is it's actually pretty nuanced, and there are two different instances that are conflated. It's easy to see how any one of these might wind up being mentioned. While she was performing in a play called Bella Donna, missus Pat was on her way to the theater when her taxi hit another taxi after swerving to avoid a child on a bicycle. She recalled that her head went through the window and she saw stars. Yeah. I have to give her a like bless this woman's tenacity moment because She got out of the crash taxi and hailed another cab to get to the theater, but she was a mess. She should not have done that. For the next six months, she was confined to bed and she was unconscious for a lot of that. She describes having to regain her physical strength and essentially relearning to walk in her memoir, but she also mentions that once she was told she was expected to make a full recovery, she experienced a wave of panic. The idea of returning to work and information that she had received about George Cornwallis West's marriage failing her possibly being involved in it. The idea that she was going to have to quote pick up the senseless things of life and go on with my career made her feel like she never wanted to return to her old life. It all seemed meaningless to her at the time. So then later in nineteen twelve, in the autumn, a second round of news came out that missus Pat had been stricken suddenly in the Pain Paper's words, and that Ford doctors had been called to the scene and could not agree on the diagnosis. Two of them believed it was partonitis and that she needed immediate surgery. The other two weren't sure and they wanted to postpone any surgical intervention. This illness was speculated to have been related to the car accident. She didn't wind up having an operation, and she slowly recovered. Yeah, you could see how all of those things got a little confused for people in some of the retellings of this story. But if you kind of pick through papers, you'll see where it all plays out. We're gonna pause here for a word from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class going, and when we come back, we will talk about the relationship between Missus pat and George Bernard Shaw. So when she was still convalescing, George Cornwallis West had come to visit Missus Patt whispering, according to her account, that he needed her help. That was the thing she describes as like helping her get through her sickness, knowing that someone needed her. But there was another man who also reached out to her while she was convalescing, and she wrote of this admirer quote, there was one who, perhaps through the intelligent grasp of his genius, understood a little the nerve wrack of my illness himself living in dreams. He made a dream world for me. Only those who can understand this can understand the friendship Bernard Shaw gave to me by my sick bed, the foolish, ridiculous letters he wrote me, and his pretense of being in love with me. Missus Pat published some of these letters in her memoir, which was a pretty scandalous move when it came out in nineteen twenty two and one. He wrote to her, quote, I haven't been quite the same man since our meeting. I suppose you are a devil, they all tell me, so when I go on raving about you, Well, I don't care. I've always said that it is the devil that makes the hell, But here is the devil who makes heaven. Wherefore I kiss your hands and praise creation for you, and hope you are well. As this leaves me at present, thank God for it. So. Missus Pat and George Bernard Shaw, who she called Joey, are often described as having an affair. They had actually known each other casually at least since the eighteen nineties, but it really wasn't until nineteen twelve that he seemed to become romantically fixated on her, and the two exchanged a lot of emotional letters, so while it could for sure be categorized as an emotional affair, it doesn't appear that they ever had a physical relationship. And from the outside, when you read them, it really seems like this correspondence may have helped Beatrice find her strength again, and the playwright noted that he sensed she was improving, writing at one point quote, I think you are getting well. I hear a ring, I see a flash in your letter. The able, courageous Stella is stirring. And perhaps she will put me away with the arrow route. No matter, I shall rejoice and glory in her. And that kind of was what happened. Beatrice shut the romance down as she got better, although she did become best friends with his sister Lucy, and she and George Bernard Shaw remained close friends. As she put it quote, when my illness was over, the real friendship which exists today was between us. In nineteen fourteen, missus Pat starred as Eliza Doolittle in the first English language version of Pigmalion. It had actually been staged in German after Shaw wrote it in nineteen twelve, but it was postponed in English until Missus pat recovered so that she could be the debut star in it. We think of Eliza Doolittle as Audrey Hepburn's role thanks to the movie My Fair Lady, but that role was written for Campbell by George Bernard Shaw. But the two of them really disagreed on the play's ending. So if you read the play as written, it ends like this. Higgins says to his mom, goodbye mother. Oh, by the way, Eliza or her a ham and Stilton cheese, will you and buy me a pair of reindeer gloves number eight and a tie to match that new suit of mine at Elan Binman's. You can choose the color. And at this point Eliza Toolittle says buy them yourself. Uh, and his mother says, I'm afraid you've spoiled that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear, I'll buy you the tie and gloves, and Higgins says to his mom, Oh, don't bother, She'll buy them all right enough. So Missus Campbell felt like this ending was ambiguous and it wasn't clear whether Eliza and Higgins would be together. She thought it lacked romance, and she did the audience out of knowing what happens to the characters that they had come to love over the course of this show. She wanted the play to have a happier ending, so when she performed it in its English language debut, she changed that line from buy them yourself to what size to indicate that Eliza was getting the gloves and would be back. This is so funny to me because it's not a particularly romantic line, but she is smart enough to be like, yes, but then they know I'm coming back, right. It's very sneaky. The playwright and his actor remained in locked horns over this issue, but every single time Missus Patt performed it, which was a lot because it really became known as her role, she finished it her way. He wrote her a letter detailing what he felt were the four levels of illiteracy, with the fourth being quote the illiteracy of Eliza Doolittle, who couldn't even read the end of her own story. He then continued, quote, there is only one person alive who is such a monster of illiteracy as to combine these four illiteracies in her single brain, and I, the greatest living master of letters, made a perfect spectacle of myself with her before all Europe. While she was making controversy on stage by defying a well known playwright, Missus Campbell was also making another controversy in her personal life. She remarried in nineteen fourteen to Major George Frederick Middleton Cornwallis West. The reason this was controversial was because Cornwallis West had just gotten divorced, as in the paperwork was completed hours before he and Missus Campbell got married. This is one of those things that sounds really sensational, but the divorce proceedings had started in the autumn of nineteen thirteen. They got married in April of nineteen fourteen, so they were waiting for these legal steps to be complete, and her children and friends all seemed pretty happy about the marriage. Any scandal about it seems to have been outside of their actual social circle, probably because the two of them were so well known. Yeah, there had been all those rumors about them, and there are some reads that she basically cut off her her flirtation or emotional affair with George Bernard Shaw because she was like, no, I'm picking George Cornwallis West. Early nineteen eighteen, Beatrice received news that her son Alan had been killed in action in France during World War One. She wrote quote one day's rest to get my heart steady and then work again. Life was pitiless. The theater hell I was in deep sea and there was no light anywhere. She includes what appeared to be all of Allan's letters from his time away at war in her memoir, as well as letters written to her about her son by his fellow soldiers and leaders in the military after he was killed. After Allan died, Missus Campbell grieved really deeply, but she did continue to work, but she was feeling worn down. In late nineteen twenty she was put on bed rest by her doctor for her nerves, and she stayed there for three months, but anxiety over money made her want to end her convalescence. She took a brief engagement where she got on stage to give a prologue at an epilogue for a short film that was being shown in between. Then she was ordered by her doctor to go to the country alone for six to eight weeks. She sold her London home, bought a small cottage and spent time writing her memoir, which was published in nineteen twenty two. In nineteen twenty seven, Missus Campbell returned to the New York stage for the first time since the loss of her son. She had not really wanted to do a big international trip. That play was The Adventurous Age, written by Frederick Whitney, and it premiered in the US on February seventh, nineteen twenty seven, at the Mansfield Theater. The play was billed as a farcical comedy and it featured a mature couple by the name of Rivers, each of whom was hoping to ensnare a much younger paramour for themselves. In Missus Pat's obituary, The New York Times stated that critics didn't like the play, and nowhere was that more apparent than in the Time's own review by Jay Brooks Atkinson, which ran the morning after the play opened, under the headline Missus Campbell returns at redd in part quote for her first appearance in America after ten or twelve years, Missus Patrick Campbell has not been happy in the selection on her play. To be perfectly candid, her selection could not have been worse. Beyond the faintest glimmering of dramatic idea, The Adventurous Age has nothing to recommend it upon any save the amateur stage, and then only among close friends who dare not show their boredom. How came an actress of her distinction to select the adventurous age. The review does seem to conclude by suggesting that missus Campbell is not the problem, that just she has terrible material in the play, and it concludes with quote, Missus Campbell deserves at least a play commensurate with her abilities. Throughout the nineteen twenties, Missus Patt's appeal to the public was waning. She was aging at a time when youthful flappers were the trend, and she knew it. She had a reputation for being bossy and biting with her words, and fewer and fewer people were willing to put up with that in an actor who was losing star power. She really got to a place financially of just screeping by for a while. Although the nineteen twenty nine play The Matriarch by Gladys bronwin Stern was successful enough and ran long enough that she was able to write her financial boat. In nineteen thirty she made the transition to film, appearing in the movie The Dancers by Sir Gerald Marier, which originated as a play in nineteen twenty three. The plot is a story of two childhood sweethearts, Una and Tony, who promised to get married as adults. Then as adults, they're reunited after Tony inherits a fortune and appears once more in UNA's life to make good on their agreement. Una agrees, but she's harboring the secret that she has not stayed true to him, whereas he has waited for her. Like many of the plots we've discussed here, particularly the ones where a woman is determined to be ruined, it ends tragically. In nineteen thirty four, she was in three more films, Riptide, One More River, An Outcast Lady, and then she appeared in the nineteen thirty five film adaptation of Crime and Punishment. In addition to acting, Missus Campbell also started booking appearances on the lecture circuit in the United States, where she taught diction. Missus Campbell's last performance was in nineteen thirty eight. She started in the thirteenth chair in Connecticut. Her career had gone on for fifty years. When she finished the show. She moved to Paris instead of going back to London. At some point she and her second husband became estranged, but they lived more or less separately, so he wasn't with her during this time. When World War Two began, Missus Patt moved from Paris to Powe in southern France. She lived there only a few months before dying of pneumonia on April ninth, nineteen forty, at the age of seventy five. Although her obituary in The New York Times was lengthy and full of praise, it's likely that she didn't get as much notice as she might have if she had died at a different time. By that point, most of the newspaper was dedicated to war coverage. The front page on April eleventh, nineteen forty had the headline Nazis driven from Bergen Trondheim. Yeah. Her o bit was kind of buried in that that obituary did manage to talk about Missus Campbell's demanding nature, but in a positive way. That write up states quote, had her temperamental whims been those of a middling talent, she probably would have faded into obscurity. But because they were coupled with a first rate ability, those who worked with her seemed to enjoy them. George C. Tyler for many years. Her American producer said of her temperament, you laughed instead of trying to strangle her. Oh that's missus, Pat. Yeah, I find her charming in her own way. I have so many things to talk about him behind the scenes. Oh good, do you have some listener maw before we do that? I do. It's from our listener, Elizabeth, and it's about our Louis Sullivan episode and buildings I got wrong, although I did go back and double check, and they seemed to be wrong in a number of places, which makes me think it's one of those cases of something being printed wrong in an authoritative place and then being repeated elsewhere. But here's the scoop, Elizabeth writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm sure you've had an architecture nerd or to descend on you already. Actually not really, but just in case, I wanted to provide you a clarification on a couple of the Chicago buildings you mentioned in the Louis Sullivan episode. The Field's building, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, was the wholesale warehouse, not the department store. The wholesale store is regarded as a landmark in the development of an American architectural style, and group floors together on the exterior in a way that foreshadowed Sullivan's later work and the commercial style of the early twentieth century. The original part of the Field's department store building was designed by Charles Attwood, who eventually took over for John Root at the Columbian Exposition. The larger parts of the building on State Street were designed by Pierce Anderson, who worked in the successor firms of D. H. Burnaman Co. Personally, I love all the Fields buildings, but I have to chuckle at what Sullivan might think. Keep up the good work. Thank you for that clarification. Never would have figured that one out on my own. If you would love to write to us, you could do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us on social media as Missed in History and if you have not subscribed yet, that is very easy to do on the iHeartRadio app pretty much anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,